[mercury-users] Proposed change to char literal syntax

[Ralph Becket]

Nicholas Nethercote, Friday,  6 October 2006:
> On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Michael Day wrote:
> 
> >>>If integer literals were customisable as well then Mercury could support 
> >>>BigInteger literals and other number types transparently. Defining the 
> >>>semantics of literal values in the library seems more elegant than 
> >>>hard-wiring them.
> >>
> >>I disagree.
> >
> >May I ask why?
> 
> I just think allowing numeric literals to have more than one possible 
> meaning is a bad idea, due to the possibility of confusion.

Yes.  The way numeric literals are handled for instance in Haskell is
pretty painful, in my experience.
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